Archive for August, 2010

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Denon has debuted a line of celebratory gear, which includes this beautiful direct drive turntable. The DP-A100 uses the same high-torque motor Denon developed in 1970, in sexy glossy black and gold.

We hear ya. Yes direct-drive turntables can suffer from the motor transmitting vibrations to the record, but not to fear, Denon gets around this by applying a dampening silicon rubber to the underside of the aluminum platter.

Plastics are an important part of our lives, but there are some environmental issues. That’s why the Japanese have come up with a machine that is capable of turning plastic back into oil that can be used to create gasoline, diesel, or kerosene.

That’s big time recycling there. The process can turn 1kg of plastic back into 1l of oil, which isn’t to shabby and it doesn’t even create any CO2 during the process. With this technique we can get far more out of our resources.

We’ve seen plenty of painted and modded Xbox 360s in our day, even an Xbox 360 laptop, but until now we’ve never seen what Tony Stark’s Xbox 360 looks like.

And thanks to Zachariah Perry Cruse, we now know. It looks just like his armor. The design student spent his summer vacation creating his very own Iron Man Xbox 360. It’s not the slim 360 console, but it has a 120GB hard drive and an HDMI socket. Why not place a bid?

Well, look at this. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab was undergoing some testing when the folks at Electronista spied it and took some video. The video doesn’t tell us much that’s new though.

It confirms that it’s a 7-inch tablet running Android, and looks just like we expected. The Samsung employee handling the device called it “awesome” and said that it was very different from the iPad’s experience. Video below.

Dish Network and it’s subscribers are joining the 21st century at last. DishOnline.com opens up online and offers on-demand streaming of content to its subscribers. At least 15 channels will stream live, including all the major networks and extras like Syfy and Comedy Central.

Right now however, selection looks a bit limited. The site will also provide remote DVR scheduling and let Sling users stream recorded content right from their device. The service will go live in the next few days and will only be available to Dish subscribers. Might be a good time to subscribe.

You can play pinball on your iPhone, but it isn’t really pinball unless you are playing with an actual pinball table, so in order to make things more realistic, at least in miniature, New Potato just released their newest accessory for the iPhone/iPod Touch called Pinball Magic.

It transforms your iPhone into a real pinball machine table. The Pinball Magic accessory comes with flipper buttons, a ball-launching plunger, LED-lit animated backbox, and foldable legs for travel. Just pop your iPhone/iPod Touch into the 30-Pin connector and play away.

The upcoming 250GB Xbox 360 hard drive is now being offered for sale at GameStop for its $130 price. Oddly this comes ahead of any official announcement from Microsoft. The drive is an upgrade for the new, slim Xbox Arcade, which includes only 4GB of built-in storage.

To refresh your memory, the drive ships preloaded with the Hexic HD game as well as with demos of A Kingdom for Kefflings, Peggle and Pinball FX. It is said to be shipping within 24 hours of you placing the order.

This weekend Virgin Mobile confirmed a major revamp of its Broadband2Go data plans that could see a return to real unlimited data. Instead of the four plans offered today, it would simplify everything to just a $40 unlimited monthly plan and a $10, 100MB 10-day plan.

A leaked memo suggests that the changes will go live on August 24. Both MiFi routers and modems should work with the cap-free access. This sure would heat up the competition among carriers for mobile data. Clear and Virgin’s US parent Sprint offer unlimited Internet, but only for their WiMAX services.

Verbatim has just launched their new Secure ‘n’ Go USB drive, which will deliver 256bit-AES hardware-encryption and of course, the all important password protection.

The drive also comes enhanced for Windows ReadyBoost, which improves your PC’s performance by letting your PC use memory capacity on your flash drive to speed up system performance. The Verbatim Secure ‘n’ Go Secure Data drive is available in 4GB for $37, 8GB for $74, and 16GB for $125.

It was not a good day for Farmer Gopal Gujjar of Bandha village in Rajasthan. It was a bad day for Nokia as well. Gujjar’s phone exploded in his face. Nokia initially had a problem with their battery, the BL-5C, that was only rumored to explode while charging.

Apparently that was not the case at all as Gujjar’s Nokia 1209 exploded in his face while he was working with his cattle and having a conversation. The explosion caused severe burns to his left ear, neck, and shoulders which turned out to be fatal. This is the first time a phone has exploded without being hooked up to a charger.

The PS3 has been a tough nut to crack for hackers. Many have tried and failed, but now an Australian online store called OzModChips is claiming that they have a thumb drive that’s loaded with the world’s first PS3 Modchip.

The drive is available for a pre-order price of $169AUD which is about $150. I guess thats not a bad price to hack the device and copy games from discs and play pirated games. Not that we endorse that. It apparently works with any model of the PS3.

Voting machines are pretty unreliable and prone to being easily hacked, so it wasn’t that hard to hack this Sequoia AVC EDGE voting machine to play Pac-Man. Pac-Man isn’t all that different from politics anyway. You have one bloated yellow bastard gobbling up all of the wealth and resources, while we all play the ghosts who try to stop them.

The machine has had it’s memory card formatted, installing DOS and MAME. It has had it’s share of rigged votes, no doubt, but now it can right that wrong by providing some fun.

The LG C900 will be available later this year, complete with a four-row keyboard for easier text messaging and emailing while on the go. There’s also a simplified two-button capacitive layout below the screen along with a chrome Windows key for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

We don’t know when AT&T will unveil the LG C900 or how much it will cost, but we expect it this holiday season.

Sounds like LG is pretty confident about its soon to be released Android-tablet, due in the fourth quarter of this year. The tablet is branded as part of the Optimus line and will take a different route than the iPad tablet.

Instead of focusing on consumption, entertainment, and multimedia, LG will be gearing its tablet toward productivity. LG’s vice president of marketing for mobile devices Chang Ma says so. “Our tablet will be better than the iPad.” He says, “It’s going to be surprisingly productive.”

Here’s something for the nerdy James Bond who needs to crunch numbers while spying on those around you. Or maybe you just want to protect your office cubicle when you’re not there. The calculator spy cam looks like a Casio desk calculator with large buttons.

It’s fully functional with a pinhole on the side. The camera can capture VGA recording (640 X 480 resolution) at 30 frames per second for about an hour and a half using its 4 GB of built-in memory.